Expanded Study

The original BMT Long-term Follow-up Study is undergoing expansion (by including patients transplanted up to 2010) and extended (with longer follow-up of the original cohort of patients) to form the Expanded BMT Long-term Follow-up Study. This study will continue to examine the health and well-being of individuals undergoing BMT, extend the length of follow-up after transplant, and, by collecting biological samples, pinpoint potential molecular markers that will allow us to dispense appropriate, timely and risk-based preventive care to help ease the late effects of therapy.

Create a repository of DNA for future study to identify/determine who is at highest risk for long-term complications, and how best to treat these conditions.

Blood or Marrow Transplants are frequently offered to patients suffering from leukemia, lymphoma, multiple myeloma and other diseases. As research and techniques have improved, the number of patients who survive such treatments has dramatically increased such that now over 70% of patients who survive the first two years after transplant become long-term survivors. Still, BMT recipients often have an increased risk for long-term complications such as heart disease, lung problems, bone problems or other new cancers. Research has yet to fully understand these long-term problems that affect transplant patients, yet appropriate, timely and risk-based preventive care may help attenuate some late effects of such therapy.

Previous studies in BMT patients have been limited by a number of complicating factors:

reliance on incomplete or inadequate registry data

failure to examine other factors that may have affected post-HCT complications (misdiagnosis)

inability to track patients for extended periods of time to wholly understand complications

lack of biological specimens to study individual differences at the molecular level that affect risk of complications.

The Expanded BMT Long-term Follow-up Study will be the largest study of its kind. We aim to study about 7500 children and adults who have undergone BMT at City of Hope or University of Minnesota between 1974 and 2010. We will also enroll 1500 siblings to serve as a comparison group. The inclusion of siblings will allow investigators to make direct comparisons with survivors providing baseline non-BMT data that may be lacking from other sources. Additionally, the use of siblings may enable us to identify potential factors that may be associated with the development of long-term complications and understand more fully the molecular basis for the complications.